PDF Version of Issue #3

DARK MATTER: WOMEN WITNESSING #3 Editorial Lise Weil Kristin Flyntz PART I : EXTINCTION From The Lost Journals of Sacajewea Debra Magpie Earling After•Word Ghost Dance: the poems of Debra Magpie Earling Melissa Kwasny Dreams before Extinction Naeemeh Naeemaei Our Radiant Lives Deena Metzger Her Body is Burning Mary Sutton My Grandmother Said Netanyahu Naomi Shihab Nye Arrest Lena Khalaf Tuffaha Tree Holocaust Sara Wright Extinction Altars Beverly Naidus Turning Point Marilyn DuHamel Bear Requiem Susan Cerulean Our Safe Word Margo Berdeshevsky PART II : DEVOTION Serach bat Asher speaks Mei Mei Sanford First, a Mother: Interview with Megan Hollingsworth of ex•tinc•tion wit•ness Lise Weil Beauty from Brokenness: Interview with Lily Yeh Caroline Casey After•Word Our Call to Indigenous Consciousness: Taiaiake Alfred’s Wasáse Sharon English From the Beginning Nova Cynthia Anderson Calling out the Names Anne Bergeron Dark Matter: Women Witnessing - December, 2015 Issue #3 - EXTINCTION / DEVOTION PART II : DEVOTION (continued) Song of the Chesapeake Julie Gabrielli I am Nothing without my Dead Nora Jamieson After•Word Nora Jamieson’s Deranged Patricia Reis The Bone in My Yard: a Story-Carrier’s Path Rebecca Brams Listening to Natural Law: Interview with Ayya Santacitta Lise Weil After•Word Kenny Ausubel’s Dreaming the Future Courtney Cable Offerings Cynthia Travis Page 3 of 220 Editorial Issue #3. EXTINCTION/DEVOTION “The last one was killed in 1959, but there was no funeral and no one cried. I don’t know where his tomb is to put flowers on it. I can only wail and mourn his passing in my own way.” – Naeemeh Naeemaei For this issue of Dark Matter, we put out a call for material focusing on “devotion”—and yet much of what’s here also revolves around the theme of “extinction.” The paintings of Iranian artist Naeemeh Naeemaei are a stunning case in point. Other striking examples: Beverly Naidus’ extinction altars, Megan Hollingsworth’s work with ex•tinc•tion wit•ness, Sara Wright’s witnessing of her beloved trees in “Tree Holocaust.” In fact, extinction could be said to haunt most of the material in this issue—perhaps not surprising considering the journal’s mission, but also, as I came to realize, the intimate relationship between extinction and devotion, the way they are braided, the way one tends to nourish, inspire, give birth to the other. After all, this journal itself, which has been very much a devotional practice for its editors, was birthed by awareness of extinction. Installation artist Lily Yeh, interviewed in this issue, puts it this way: “…the beauty that moves comes from the broken dark places.” All this is to say that though we’ve divided the issue into two parts, “extinction” and “devotion,” almost every piece in it could go in either one. The words in the epigraph above refer to the Caspian Tiger, depicted in Naeemaei’s series Dreams of Extinction which appears in this issue. Her tiger is surrounded by weeping women who are giving him the proper ceremonial farewell he deserves. There’s an interesting parallel in Nora Jamieson’s recently published Deranged, reviewed in this issue, where a woman holds a funeral service for a coyote who was poisoned by her neighbour. She even puts an obituary notice in the paper: “Eastern Grey Coyote died on February 10th from an acute illness after suffering excruciating convulsions and suffocation.…She will be dearly missed by those she leaves behind, her family pack and Anna Holmes of Mountain Road who is holding calling hours on February 12th from 9p.m. to midnight.” I read somewhere that death rituals and ceremonies are what distinguish human from non-human animals. But to say this is to ignore the fact that there are also categories of human beings whose deaths go unacknowledged—by ritual, ceremony, or even markers. In “Ghost Dance: the Poetics of Loss,” also featured in this issue, Melissa Kwasny writes of the obscene disrespect for sites of Indian genocide in the U.S. “A bus driver smokes a cigarette in the parking lot at Sand Creek. The effect is devastating. The lack of monuments, plaques, or any sign of public recognition in some of these places bears witness to a total disregard for what happened, as well as to the people involved.” And in poems that for this reader evoke the almost 1,200 missing and murdered indigenous women here in Canada, until very recently stubbornly ignored by our government, Debra Earling writes of the disappearing of Dark Matter: Women Witnessing - December, 2015 Issue #3 - EXTINCTION / DEVOTION native women: “No one speaks about the woman/dying in the frail rising of a killing day./A woman hard- frozen in the field…” This journal arose in part out of my own distress over the horrific unprecedented loss of animal and plant life on this earth due to human activity. However the question of human extinction has never been far from my mind.* Two days after launching the first issue I was on a plane to Poland to spend five days in Auschwitz-Birkenau bearing witness with Zen peacemakers. On both of my trips to Auschwitz (this was my second) I met Palestinians who’d braved objections and sometimes rejection by friends and family to come and bear witness with us. I remember one of them saying he could no longer face these ruins every day, they were too much like the landscape he awoke to every morning at home (Palestinian poet Lena Khalaf Tuffaha writes in this issue that what Palestinians have endured for decades is “a project of erasure that leaves no human being, olive tree, or square meter of land unscathed”). On one of the last days of this second trip to Auschwitz, I asked a young Palestinian woman what she would take home from this experience. She said: “At home we have no museums no monuments no archives, no way to remember our dead. I will create memorials.” The poems of Tuffaha and Naomi Shihab Nye in this issue are both asking questions about the politics of perception. Who gets seen? Acknowledged? “What does it mean,” Nye writes in “Netanyahu,” “when one person thinks/others deserve nothing? What is that called? If you know what it is called why keep/doing it?” In an interview in the Huffington Post about her recently published book Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs, theoretical physicist Lisa Randall says something similar about the implications of dark matter for the nature of human perception. Though dark matter is not visible to the human eye, she writes, it’s “essential to the structure and formation of the universe.” This fact helps “to illuminate the gap between our limited observations and the many barely perceived phenomena that permeate our reality…Race and class differences call for empathy largely because of our difficulties in understanding what we can't experience or see, including the often hidden cultural forces that animate other people and their communities.” The “Black Lives Matter” movement had been in existence two years when Dark Matter was launched last November and it seemed to me at the time there was a strong subliminal connection between the two. Randall’s words make that connection explicit. In recognition of the fact that when it comes to erasure and extinction, the line between the human and the nonhuman animal is not always easy to draw, that there are categories of humans who are still treated like nonhuman animals (see Tuffaha’s poem “Arrest”), our focus broadens with this issue to include extinction in the human realm. Our primary dedication, however, continues to be to the more- than-human world that is bearing the brunt of our civilization’s industrial and technological success—a Page 3 of 218 fact that tends to be ignored by humans, even spiritually developed humans dedicated to social justice. In Auschwitz, my attempts to bring up the parallels to ecocide that kept presenting themselves to me were often met with indifference, if not resentment. (Which is why I was so happy to learn of Buddhist nuns who have taken on the issue of humans’ warped relationship to the earth – see my interview with Ayya Santacitta in “Listening to Natural Law.”) The astonishing inattention of the rest of the world is the driver of George Monbiot’s article in The Guardian about the “eco-apocalyptic fires” that have been raging across Indonesia since July: “The fires are destroying treasures as precious and irreplaceable as the archaeological remains being levelled by Isis, clouded leopards, sun bears, gibbons, the Sumatran rhinoceros and Sumatran tiger…” Monbiot writes that there are thousands or possibly millions more threatened species being driven from their habitat. The title of his article is “Nothing to See Here.” II. “…aching for—seeking a word, some word(s) that might bear what we are knowing, and what we are yet desperate for. Desperate for safety? For peace? For better memories? Of course. What word will make our lives safe? I’m trying, as you are—to find it.” – Margo Berdeshevsky The above words are from notes to the poem-collage “Our Safe Word” which appears in this issue. They, and the poem, were written by a poet who lives in Paris— and they were written before the Paris attacks in November. Often, the most important part of our knowing, as human beings, is not conscious. Is dark matter. Even consciously, it seems we all know a whole lot more than we did just over a year ago when the first issue of this journal came out—and much of “what we are knowing” often seems difficult if not impossible to bear.

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